Smaller, decentralised forges actually make lots of sense from a digital sovereignty point of view. Over reliance on a single instance like GitHub is not healthy in the long run. The issue they would have to solve is federation.
And on top of that, spam is a huge issue. We've progressively further and further locked down new accounts on gitlab.xfce.org because the spam situation has just gotten so bad. We actually don't allow new "native" account creation at this point, and ask people to come to our Matrix channel to ask for an account. We do allow SSO from Github and gitlab.com, but some spam still sneaks through that way too.
I have my own personal Gitea instance that just doesn't allow outside users at all. I'd love to move all my personal projects to it, but at some point I would actually like to try to start a community around one or two of them, and I don't want to have to deal with spam.
Thank you for maintaining Xfce! It's the best de around.
(Edit: Turns out there’s a very obvious and widely used option. git format-patch + git send-email is used to develop major open source software such as Linux, GCC, and Git itself.)
That's fine for pull requests, perhaps, depending on your preferred UX, but what about a bug tracker? CI? Release artifacts?
But that wasn't hip enough so everyone moved to GitHub.
You may prefer email over the latter, but I think these days you're in the minority. Your level of derision at this fact doesn't really change anything.